Congressional Hispanic Caucus Statement On President Trump’s Budget Request for Fiscal Year 2021

WASHINGTON — Congressman Joaquin Castro (TX-20), Chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), issued the following statement in response to President Trump's budget request for Fiscal Year 2021:

"Our national budgets should be a statement of our values and invest in programs that improve everyday life for American families and ensure a future for our children. Instead of meeting these most basic requirements, President Trump's budget ransacks programs that benefit families in order to prioritize inhumane policies that detain parents and children, ramp up his deportation machine, and fund his ineffective border wall.

"At every turn, this budget fails the American people in order to further Trump's extreme political agenda. While Trump requests billions for wall construction for Fiscal Year 2021, we already know that he will abuse transfer authorities to redirect more funding at the expense of real national security issues and military families. Meanwhile, Trump is calling for millions more to keep asylum-seekers trapped in dangerous border towns under the Remain in Mexico policy, and simultaneously slashing foreign aid to countries like Mexico and those in Latin America, the countries bearing the brunt of the humanitarian crisis created by the Administration.

"In American communities, the President proposes increasing the number of ICE detention beds to 60,000, allowing an agency plagued by deaths and allegations of misconduct to incarcerate more families. At the same time, the Administration plans on slashing funding for the Census after spending the last year using it to intimidate communities of color and immigrant families.

"Congress cannot accept this budget proposal in good conscience. We cannot prioritize enforcing cruelty at the expense of programs that all Americans rely on – education for their children, public health, nutritional and housing programs, and environmental protections – to pay for this scam of a federal government. I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure that we fund our government in a way that protects everyday families and American values."

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The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), founded in December 1976, is organized as a Congressional Member organization, governed under the Rules of the U.S. House of Representatives. The CHC is dedicated to voicing and advancing, through the legislative process, issues affecting Hispanics in the United States, Puerto Rico and U.S. Territories.